ABSTRACT
Introduction Of the peoples in Arabia mentioned in the Assyrian texts from Tiglath Pileser onwards, several appear in the Old Testament: Saba/Sheba, Ephah, mefanfm, Nebayot, Qedar, Adbe?el and Massa' . As we have emphasized, the contemporary Assyrian sources do not indicate identity between Arabs and any of these tribes, except perhaps Qedar. We find the same picture in the Old Testament. Even though f arab are mentioned, they are never explicitly identified with any of the other entities mentioned as living in Arabia. In much later Jewish tradition, reflected in the works of Josephus, we find the identification between the sons of Ishmael and arabes. Among the former we find Qedar and Dumah which, as is plainly documented from Assyrian sources, are either Arabs or closely connected with them. But the extension of the concept to all other Ishmaelites, and even to everybody living on the peninsula, is not documented until Hellenistic times. We should thus not ohne weiteres apply the ideas of later centuries to ethnic conditions in Assyrian, Chaldaean and Achaemenid times. I
Nevertheless, it is well worth studying the picture of ethnic conditions in Arabia given by the Old Testament, since it is in fact the earliest attempt at a systematic description of peoples living on the peninsula. The central documents are the genealogies in the Pentateuch, which represent an Israelite view of the ethnic and political situation in the Middle East in the centuries around 500 Be. To these are added a few notices in the Pentateuch and in other Old Testament texts. The exact dating of these texts is still far from settled, but the general view among scholars is that the whole material of the Pentateuch was codified in its present shape towards the end of the fifth century BC at the latest, and that the preceding written tradition may reach back a few centuries. The Pentateuch itself, as is well known, purports to give an account of the prehistory of Israel, i.e. the periods before 1100 BC. Even though the Pentateuch does contain older layers and sometimes very archaic ones, it is very difficult at present to use the Pentateuch as a real historical source for the pre-monarchic period of Israelite history. The texts basically reflect the time in which they were conceived, retold and committed to writing. Bearing this in mind, it is important to single out the elements in the Pentateuchal tradition which are older than the final redaction.
